Nvidia and Booz Allen develop Morpheus platform to supercharge security AI 

One of the biggest challenges facing modern organizations is the fact that security teams aren’t scalable. Even well-resourced security teams struggle to keep up with the pace of enterprise threats when monitoring their environments without the use of security artificial intelligence (AI).

However, today at the 2022 Nvidia GTC conference, Nvidia and enterprise consulting firm Booz Allen announced they are partnering together to release a GPU-accelerated AI cybersecurity processing framework called the Morpheus platform. 

So far, Booz Allen has used Morpheus to create Cyber Precog, a GPU-accelerated software platform for building AI models at the network’s edge, which offer data ingestion capabilities at 300x the rate of CPUs, and boost AI training by 32x and AI inference by 24x. 

The new solution will enable public and private sector companies to address some of the cybersecurity challenges around closing the cyberskills gap with AI optimized for using GPUs, enabling much more processing to take place than if it was relying on CPUs. 

Finding threats with digital fingerprinting 

Identifying malicious activity in a network full of devices is extremely difficult to do without the help of automation. 

Research shows that 51% of IT security and SOC decision-makers feel their team is overwhelmed by the volume of alerts, with 55% admitting that they aren’t entirely confident in their ability to prioritize and respond to them. 

Security AI has the potential to lighten the loads of SOC analysts by automatically identifying anomalous — or high-risk — activity, and blocking it. 

For instance, the Morpheus software framework enables developers to inspect network traffic in real time, and identify anomalies based on digital fingerprinting. 

“We call it digital fingerprinting of users and machines, where you basically can get to a very granular model for every user or every machine in the company, and you can basically build the model on how that person should be interacting with the system,” said Justin Boitano, VP, EGX of Nvidia. 

“So if you take a user like myself, and I use Office 365 and Outlook every day, and suddenly me as a user starts trying to log in into build systems or other sources of IP in the company, that should be an event that alerts our security teams,” Boitano said. 

It’s an approach that gives the solution the ability to examine network traffic for sensitive information, detect phishing emails, and alert security teams with AI processing powered by large BERT models that couldn’t run on CPUs alone. 

Entering the security AI cluster category: UEBA, XDR, EDR 

As a solution, Morpheus is competing against a wide range of security AI solutions, from user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) solutions to extended detection and response (XDR) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions designed to discover potential threats.

One of the organizations competing against Nvidia in the realm of threat detection is CrowdStrike Falcon Enterprise, which combines next-gen antivirus (NGAV), endpoint detection and response, threat hunting, and threat intelligence as part of a single solution to continuously and automatically identify threats in enterprise environments.

CrowdStrike recently announced raising $431 million in revenue during the 2022 fiscal year. 

Another potential competitor is IBM QRadar, an XDR solution that uses AI to identify security risks with automatic root cause analysis and MITRE ATT&CK mapping, while providing analysts with support in the form of automated triaging and contextual intelligence. IBM announced raising $16.7 billion in revenue in 2021. 

With Nvidia recently announcing second quarter revenue of $6.7 billion, and now combining the strength of Nvidia’s GPUs alongside Booz Allen’s expertise, the Morpheus framework stands in a unique position to empower enterprises to conduct greater analytic data processing activities at the edge of the network to help supercharge threat detection.